About this item
Widely considered the most important poet in America today, John Ashbery creates collage both in his poetry and as visual art. This beautiful volume features Ashbery's collage work in both media. John Ashbery is known foremost as a poet, but he has been creating collages for nearly as long as he's been writing poetry. He began working in the medium when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, more than seventy years ago. Now, for the first time ever, this volume compiles a comprehensive selection of Ashbery's collage work, accompanied by a selection of collage-related poems. Like his poetry, Ashbery's collage work combines art historical and pop culture references, creating often humorous juxtapositions. Ashbery's approach to poetry and collage is quite similar and here, in an extensive interview with poet, critic, and longtime friend John Yau, Ashbery delves into his creative process and the parallels between creating in the two media.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia University, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade.His many collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007) , which was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes--the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award--and an early book, Some Trees (1956) , was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008.Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York.
